The Cultch unveils full live winter-spring season, starting with Ronnie Burkett and new Corey Payette musical Starwalker
Australia’s popular Circa troupe and New Zealand’s Indian Ink Theatre Company will also hit Vancouver
Starwalker is a new musical written and directed by Corey Payette, in an Urban Ink and Raven Theatre coproduction, in association with The Musical Stage Co. Actor Dillan Chiblow; art direction Andrea Tetrault; Photo by Matt B
Kylie Vincent in BIRD.
THE CULTCH HAS just released its winter-spring season, kicking off in January 2023 and mixing big local premieres with visits by popular national and international acts.
Several of the shows mark the return of The Cultch’s Femme Festival, celebrating feminist voices.
January 10 to 29 at the Cultch Historic Theatre, Toronto theatre and puppet master Ronnie Burkett will open a world premiere of Little Willy, in which his The Daisy Theatre gang of eccentric marionettes return to take on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Next up, January 17 to 21, 10 acrobats from Australia’s innovative Circa troupe present Sacre at the Vancouver Playhouse in a copresentation with DanceHouse. It melds circus with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring to the circus stage.
Urban Ink’s Corey Payette, the talent behind groundbreaking musicals like Children of God, sees the world premiere of his new Starwalker February 16 to March 5 at the Historic Theatre. The story follows Starwalker, an Indigi-Queer Two-Spirit drag queen learning the ropes of the East Van Drag community when their world is thrown upside down. The score mixes pop and rock with a pulsing drum set. The show is an Urban Ink and Raven Theatre coproduction, in association with The Musical Stage Co.
Yet another world premiere is on deck with My Little Tomato, a Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre (vAct) and Zee Zee coproduction, in association with rice & beans theatre. Staged March 9 to 19 at the Historic Theatre, it’s a surreal rom-com in which a Chinese-Canadian kindergarten teacher inherits a farm from his deceased parents. He vows to continue the business to honor his family name, and along the way, Japanese-Irish-Canadian produce wholesaler and bar-star Joe McKinley unwittingly falls for him—cueing historical familial, cultural, and relationship issues.
Late March, watch for New Zealand’s Indian Ink Theatre Company with its Paradise or the Impermanence of Ice Cream, a new play about impermanence, featuring Jacob Rajan’s solo performance and touching on both the true story of India’s vanishing vultures and tales of the afterlife. It features laughter, puppetry, and a bit of Bollywood disco.
April sees two unintentionally bird-related productions. Vancovuer’s critically acclaimed The Search Party is back with Stupid F*cking Bird. by American playwright Aaron Posner and “sort of adapted from Chekhov’s The Seagull.” It runs April 12 to 23 at the Historic Theatre. It’s followed by BIRD, in the more intimate Vancity Culture Lab, where Kylie Vincent arrives straight off her eight-month-long United States tour and one-month run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The show is described as “equal parts stand-up, memoir, and fever dream”, touching on true-life trauma.
April 26 to 30 at the York, RAVEN, from Germany’s still hungry, brings another new spin on circus arts, looking at the stigma surrounding the German concept “Rabenmutter” (raven mother—a selfish, neglectful mother).
Vancouver’s Ruby Slippers Theatre take to the Culture Lab in May with ūtszan (to make better), a one-woman show performed by playwright-actor Yvonne Wallace about first-language reclamation.
The same month, Vancouver’s Tara Cheyenne Performance presents Body Parts at the Historic Theatre—a disarming solo show about body issues, blending stand-up comedy, kinetic gesture, and dance.
Theatre Replacement takes the same stage in May, with New Age Attitudes: Live in Concert described as “part pop-up book, part performance” and featuring theatre-maker and musician Amanda Sum.
May 24 to June 4, Punctuate! Theatre presents First Métis Man of Odesa at the Historic Theatre, about a Canadian playwright on a research trip in Kyiv. There, he meets Mariya, a Ukrainian actor, sparking up a cross-cultural romance. It stars award-winning theatre artists and real-life married couple Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova, unfurling theior real Odesa-to-Alberta love story.
Choose 3, Choose 5, and Choose 8 subscriptions are available online and through The Cultch box office now at 604-251-1363 and boxoffice@thecultch.com.
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